A bomb destroyed high-powered lawyer Gil Lemieux’s seemingly perfect life, and PTSD has ruled every decision since the explosion that left him scarred inside and outside. Moving home with his mom is meant to be a temporary measure, just like proofreading for a medical institution is only meant to be a stopgap. But two years after taking on the wrong court case, he’s still living in fear.

Keith Kramer might be based 1,500 miles away from Gil, but their shared work brings them together—a chance meeting that’s life-changing. Gil is drawn to Keith’s good looks and intelligence, but it’s his innate understanding that Gil is more than the scars on his skin that is truly attractive. He’s everything Gil used to be and more. It blows Gil’s mind that his attraction might be returned.

Only doubt could widen the distance between them. Keith’s hopefulness, borne out of surviving some tough challenges of his own, isn’t enough to bridge the distance alone. Gil will need to believe he has as much to offer as Keith if they’re to build a life together.

Pages or Words: 86,700 words

Categories: Contemporary, Gay Fiction, M/M Romance, Romance

Excerpt:

Thanks for hosting me today. I’m excited to be here to share an excerpt from my new book, Silver Scars. So let’s get started.

“You’re making great strides, Gil. Huge.” Her angular blue-black bangs shift as she shakes her head to emphasize her words. “A few weeks ago you navigated three airports twice and got through a nightmare on a plane next to a stranger who comforted you with touch. You went to a new city far away from home all by yourself. No safe person in sight. You even walked around alone, went to new places, talked to people. You stood on a stage and shared your poetry. You fell in love.” She says the last sentence with extra intensity.

“I didn’t fall in love. I fell in lust and have a very strong desire to continue my relationship with Keith no matter how ridiculous it is. An office affair….” I wiggle my fingers to keep them loose and notice Dr. Soto glance down at them. The damn things have a mind of their own.

“We’ll talk about that, but first I want to talk about the sort of exposures you want to work up to as well as those you’re willing to work on this week. Ones you feel ready to face.”

Exposure therapy. That’s the sort of shit you see on newsmagazine shows when they take someone terrified of flying and eventually work them up to getting on a flight. People watch this shit for entertainment’s sake, laughing at this person who sweats and shakes while attempting to sit in a fucking mock-up of a fuselage. Sitting in an airplane seat in an empty room nowhere near a plane can send them into fits.

I’m the person people are laughing at, but it’s not because I’m afraid of something understandable like getting into a tin tube that flies 30,000 feet above the earth. I’m afraid of what used to be my haven, my safe place. And I’m afraid of being alone, which is why I live with my mom. I’m afraid of crowds and open spaces and nearly everything I’m not familiar with. Even things I am familiar with. I’m easily startled by loud noises and people touching me. I’m a disaster.

But I’m no longer willing to be.

That’s Gil from Silver Scars, mentally beating himself up in a therapy session because he’s no longer that man he used to be. Explosions change things. But that excerpt tells you a lot about him, especially the last line. Gil is ready to move on, to fight for change so he can become even better than he used to be.

He’s been working with Dr. Soto for months and making strides, but it isn’t until he meets Keith, the man Dr. Soto thinks he fell in love with, that he’s ready to work even harder. Love… er… lust can be a very powerful healing force. 😉

Posy Roberts writes about romantic male love. Whether these characters are family men, drag queens, or lonely men searching for connections, they all find a home in her stories.

Posy is married to a man who makes sure she doesn’t forget to eat or sleep; her daughter, a budding author and dedicated Whovian, helps her come up with character names. When Posy’s not writing, she enjoys crafting, hiking, and singing spontaneously about the mundane, just to make normal seem more interesting.

Thank you for hosting me. I want to talk today about something quite dear to me and my character Gil from Silver Scars.

Nearly thirteen years ago I became a mother to a very sickly little girl. Poppy spent five of her first twelve months in the hospital, most of them in intensive care. Her first stint was in the neonatal ICU. My husband and I apparently snowed the doctors and nurses into thinking we could manage our daughter’s care while she waited for her surgical date, so they sent our barely five pound baby home with us, along with some truly terrifying medical equipment. Frankenstein scary.

This was the start of my anxiety.

We had very good reason to be anxious, as I found out up close and personal when Poppy turned blue in my arms, choking on her own saliva. After back blows, chest thrusts, and an ambulance ride to town, she ended up in the NICU again. She had surgery at two months and then another at three months. There were more operations for numerous things, but she eventually came home to live a fairly normal life, even though she was tube fed until she was three years old.

During that time, Poppy had an infant and toddler teacher come into our home to engage her in therapeutic play. I got to be quite close with this woman and very much looked forward to her visits because they were stress relievers.

One day she brought something for me, something she thought would be helpful for those days I was anxious about Poppy or another upcoming operation. She brought me a book of mandalas. The best way to describe a mandala is to show you. Here’s one I colored all those years ago when I was a new mom.

In my new book, Silver Scars, Gil Lemieux has suffered from anxiety, panic attacks, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder since a bomb was planted to kill him. He’s been in therapy ever since, and when he goes on a trip to Sedona, AZ, a woman suggests the active meditation of coloring mandalas to help him heal. That comes straight out of my experience. The act of coloring gave my mind answers to questions I didn’t even know how to ask prior to starting. As I soon discovered, if I colored a mandala while focusing on a specific problem, I often found an answer or at least found a way to decrease my worries as I filled in shape after shape on these beautiful circles. When I wrote about Gil, mandalas seemed like a natural tool for him because of the active participation. After the bomb changed him inside and out, he was hopeless and felt very much out of control and pulled from his norm. After meeting Keith Kramer, Gil is ready to make some serious changes so they can be together, but he knows he has more healing to do first. For me, coloring Mandalas is still something I go to when I feel anxious. Try it. You might like it as much as Gil and I do.